After talking about it for the past few weeks the XML Developer Center on MSDN is finally here. As mentioned in my previous post on the Dev Center the most obvious changes from the previous incarnation of http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml are
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The XML Developer Center will provide an entry point to working with XML in Microsoft products such as Office and SQL Server.
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The XML Developer Center will have an RSS feed.
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The XML Developer Center will pull in content from my work weblog.
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The XML Developer Center will provide links to recommended books, mailing lists and weblogs.
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The XML Developer Center will have content focused on explaining the fundamentals of the core XML technologies such as XML Schema, XPath, XSLT and XQuery.
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The XML Developer Center will provide sneak peaks at advances in XML technologies at Microsoft that will be shipping future releases of the .NET Framework, SQL Server and Windows.
As mentioned in my previous post the first in a series of articles describing the changes to System.Xml in version 2.0 of the .NET Framework is now up. Mark Fussell has published What's New in System.Xml for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Release which mentiones the top 10 changes to the core APIs in the System.Xml namespace.
There is one cool new addition that is missing from Mark's article, which I guess would be number 11 of his top 10 list. The XSD Inference API which can be used to create an XML Schema definition language (XSD) schema from an XML instance document will also be part of System.Xml in Whidbey. Given the enthusiasm we saw in various parties about XSD inference we decided to promote it from just being a freely downloadable tool to being part of the .NET Framework. Below are a couple of articles about XSD Inference
If you have any thoughts about what you'd like to see on the Dev Center or any comments on the new design, please let me know.